"But we have sacrificed, God knows."

[rusty charly]

Last week, the Administration launched a new public-relations campaign aimed at marketing the war in Iraq as the indispensable key to the struggle against terrorism. The Vice-President and the Secretary of Defense gave speeches attacking the war’s opponents (a category that includes, if that same CNN poll is to be believed, sixty-one per cent of the American public) as the contemporary counterparts of the appeasers of Nazism. President Bush, as one of his contributions to the P.R. campaign, granted an interview to Brian Williams, of NBC. As the two men, shirtsleeved in the sun, strolled together down a bleak New Orleans street, Williams wondered if the President shouldn’t “have asked for some sort of sacrifice after 9/11.” Bush’s reply:

Americans are sacrificing. I mean, we are. You know, we pay a lot of taxes. America sacrificed when they, you know, when the economy went into the tank. Americans sacrificed when, you know, air travel was disrupted. American taxpayers have paid a lot to help this nation recover. I think Americans have sacrificed.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/060911ta_talk_hertzberg

And so we have. Not by paying “a lot of taxes,” of course; we pay less of those than we did before, and the very, very richest among us pay much, much less. But we have sacrificed, God knows. “The military occupation in Iraq is consuming practically the entire defense budget and stretching the Army to its operational limits,” John Lehman, Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan Administration and a member of the 9/11 Commission, wrote in the Washington Post a couple of days after Bush’s interview. “This is understood quite clearly by both our friends and our enemies, and as a result, our ability to deter enemies around the world is disintegrating.” That’s a sacrifice. And here’s another: our country’s reputation.

[Selatius]

1. I would say poor people pay slightly less taxes now than before

But if your payroll income and unearned income was anywhere past six digits, you most definitely pay a lot less in taxes than your parents or grandparents did.

When we talk of sacrifice, we are not talking about taxes. We are talking about a concerted war effort. Where is the call for car pooling? Where is the call to run the air-conditioning at 78 degrees instead of 72 during the summer months to save power? Where is the call to run the heater a little less often during the winter months to save more fuel? Is that too much to ask Americans to do? Where is the call to institute a public works program to increase the size of our mass transit networks so fewer people may feel the need to drive their cars?

[pansypoo53219]

2. except that his daddy was a vet

i am thinking his family's WW2 experience did not include gas rationing, or victory garden.
so of course taxes are enough.